The Truth

Producing a successful podcast isn’t as simple as it once was. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still plenty of room to make a splash in the industry (as it’s just now really taking off), but it is important as a publisher to take note and make adjustments as insights and information become more readily available.

While there are plenty of general rules of thumb for things like topic selection, show flow/format, publishing times and marketing tactics, we wanted to see if we could drill down and find insights that would be specifically helpful depending on the category of podcast.

Good thing we did a deep dive, because we found that listening behaviors, based on the podcast’s category, significantly differ. Which means that, as a podcaster, publishing time, based on the podcast’s category, truly matters. This also gives advertisers the data they need to partner with particular podcast categories as an opportunity to develop more time-specific ads.

Since our March report the battle for podcasting power has stepped up a notch – both Apple Podcasts and Spotify have drawn their best weapons in a bid for audio dominance.

In May Bloomberg wrote that Spotify would be focusing the company’s efforts into overhauling the App, putting podcasts on a level playing with music. Furthermore, in the last 24 hours, the company announced that it would be testing out playlist features over the course of this summer, helping users to discover new podcast shows. Business Standard said they would be testing the water with just 5% of users in a small percentage of markets (the UK, US, and Canada to name a few) the company wants to combat the issue, quickly. Continue reading “Apple VS Spotify – May 2019”

We were originally led to predict the surge in popularity as a result of the growth of Spanish language podcasts on Voxnest (13%+ in 2018), combined with the intuition that market leaders would enter new markets such as South America. And, as reported just three weeks ago, Spotify has had an impressive expansion into the South American market thanks in part to the company’s strong Spanish language content combined with the penetration of android devices in the region.

According to Edison’s Infinite Dial 2019 report released last week in partnership with Triton Digital, 70% of the US population is familiar with podcasting, up 6% from last year.

Since Edison’s stats are based on U.S. figures, we wanted to add some worldwide insights to the conversation, pulling demographic data from our global network to make comparisons. Based on usage stats from February 2018 and February 2019, we broke the data down based on podcast listening by gender and listening by age to illustrate our angle on the subject.